Honors Help Heal Scars of Wwii Pow Survivors

Honors Help Heal Scars of Wwii Pow Survivors

Article excerpt

I'm in the Kravetz living room in Chalfant. "Family Feud" is on
but nobody's watching. Frank Kravetz is showing me a divot, about
the size that a sand wedge might leave if it could cleave skin, in
his left thigh.

That's his souvenir from a bombing mission over Germany on Nov.
2, 1944. That and more than 100 pieces of shrapnel in the leg, and
30 more in his right foot, compliments of the German fighter planes
and anti-aircraft fire that ripped apart his tail-gunner's perch in
a B-17 Flying Fortress.

"That's pretty now," says his wife, Anne, of the wound she first
saw through a 19-year-old's eyes when her beau returned home in
1945.

I took her word that the old wound has gotten more attractive. It
still looked pretty fierce, but the Kravetzes are celebrating their
67th anniversary this weekend and I don't think she'd lie.

Mr. Kravetz, 89, who served for roughly a decade as the national
director of American Ex-Prisoners of War, is one of four World War
II POWs who have lived in this borough with a population of less
than 1,000. Mr. Kravetz is the only one still living. At noon
Saturday, Sept. 21, the day after National POW/MIA Recognition Day,
they will be honored at a flag-raising ceremony at the borough's war
memorial.

The other Chalfant POWs were Steve Minnaji, another prisoner of
the Germans; and Joseph Bisaha and James Joyce, prisoners of the
Japanese. A fifth resident, Nicholas Mogus, was missing in action in
the European Theater. Three more were killed in action there:
Michael O'Rourke, Henry Ambrose and Joseph Leonard.

Further details are scant. This little slice of the Turtle Creek
Valley once made an extraordinary sacrifice of its young men, but
life goes on, and people forget. Mr. Kravetz, who spent months
recovering from his wounds in a German prison hospital and then a
prisoner-of-war camp, has gathered his memories in a self-published
autobiography, "Eleven Two."

Nov. 2 -- or 11/2 -- is the date he reported for duty with the
Army Air Corps in 1943, the date he was shot down in '44 and the
date he was honorably discharged in '45. It's also the date his book
was published in 2010.

The man has a vivid way of sharing the brush strokes that paint a
life. …